4 ms·

> But I agree, here we are, getting angry at bitcoin because it uses so much energy, but if I would need to guess, could it be that Discord and Slack _alone_ us

> But I agree, here we are, getting angry at bitcoin because it uses so much energy, but if I would need to guess, could it be that Discord and Slack _alone_ use more energy world-wide than the entire bitcoin network? Those are on 100% of the time on most PCs. No. The answer is clearly no. Lets do some quick back of the napkin math to see why... Discord reports ~150 million monthly active users. Lets assume they're all on all the time. Lets assume most of these users are hardware that's running in the 50watt range (very high for mobile, high for a laptop, lowish for desktop) - Further lets assume that discord uses ALL of it (and we know this is false - it's likely under 5%). So we have 150 million machines, using 50 watts. This is ~7500 megawatts of power for discord. Now we run the same numbers for Slack - we'll keep the hardware estimates the same, but use the latest slack numbers of ~12 million active users. So we have 12 million machines, using 50 watts. This is ~600 megawatts of power for slack. So combined, for discord and slack, assuming they use the ENTIRE power budget of the machine they run on, they represent about 8100 Megawatts of power usage. The best number I can find for bitcoin puts the usage at about 150 terawatt hours a year. If we take our 8100 megawatts and run it for a year - we get... drumroll: 70.956 terawatt hours of annual consumption. Or roughly half the power consumption of bitcoin, even when we assume discord and slack are literally consuming the ENTIRE power budget of the machines they're running on, and that they're running literally all the time. A more realistic guess might be that slack and discord use roughly 1% of the electricity that bitcoin uses. And personally - I think they're providing a boat-load more value for the watts. Fair caution - All my numbers are back of the envelope, and I did the math quickly and without paper. Feel free to point out if I missed something or dropped a step in a calculation.

TheMode 4y ago
Agree that Discord & Slack alone are probably not the sole culprits. But if you expand this to all existing computers (including datacenters) and programs using unnecessary abstraction layers, I wouldn't be surprised if we heavily surpassed bitcoin. All that to say that IMO there is a fairly big incentive to re-think our software stack. Part of the issue is that it is hard to optimize software for all platform/hardware, therefore creating the need for abstraction. I wonder how this would all look if we suddenly stopped developing new hardware and put everyone on the same page, would software slowly become more efficient?
- horsawlarway 4y ago
  I think it would be far worse if we stopped developing new hardware. The focus on mobile devices, and battery life in particular, has done a tremendous amount to reduce power consumption. A typical desktop computer from the 2000s could easily use 1000w. Some of the pentium 4 variants burn through more than 100w alone - not including any of the rest of the hardware in the machine, or the monitor. A modern laptop will usually come in under 50w - and can usually idle down under 10w. Servers 20 years ago were mostly big power hungry machines running in closets somewhere - now they're heavily power optimized machines running in AWS/Azure/GCP/Other's data centers. CPU cycles have gotten ridiculously cheap (both monetarily and in terms of power usage). Single-threaded performance hasn't gotten all that much better. The market is already optimizing for reducing power usage, because power isn't free and because batteries are a constraining factor in mobile devices.
  - TheMode 4y ago
    I know, my point was about how software developers could be forced to make more efficient software instead of relying on more and more powerful hardware. Also, how many CPU generations would be required to compare to our current hardware with more optimized (or simply less bloated) applications?

TheMode 4y ago

Agree that Discord & Slack alone are probably not the sole culprits. But if you expand this to all existing computers (including datacenters) and programs using unnecessary abstraction layers, I wouldn't be surprised if we heavily surpassed bitcoin. All that to say that IMO there is a fairly big incentive to re-think our software stack. Part of the issue is that it is hard to optimize software for all platform/hardware, therefore creating the need for abstraction. I wonder how this would all look if we suddenly stopped developing new hardware and put everyone on the same page, would software slowly become more efficient?

horsawlarway 4y ago
I think it would be far worse if we stopped developing new hardware. The focus on mobile devices, and battery life in particular, has done a tremendous amount to reduce power consumption. A typical desktop computer from the 2000s could easily use 1000w. Some of the pentium 4 variants burn through more than 100w alone - not including any of the rest of the hardware in the machine, or the monitor. A modern laptop will usually come in under 50w - and can usually idle down under 10w. Servers 20 years ago were mostly big power hungry machines running in closets somewhere - now they're heavily power optimized machines running in AWS/Azure/GCP/Other's data centers. CPU cycles have gotten ridiculously cheap (both monetarily and in terms of power usage). Single-threaded performance hasn't gotten all that much better. The market is already optimizing for reducing power usage, because power isn't free and because batteries are a constraining factor in mobile devices.
- TheMode 4y ago
  I know, my point was about how software developers could be forced to make more efficient software instead of relying on more and more powerful hardware. Also, how many CPU generations would be required to compare to our current hardware with more optimized (or simply less bloated) applications?